Valentine

Valentine's Day, that holiday of excess and invented obligation, is just
around the corner, and plans, like it or not, must be made. Some of you,
no doubt, will be celebrating your love for whatever spouse or significant
other you have managed to acquire. Good for you! But many of the rest
of us, having been deprived of a date by some chance or another, will
no doubt settle into our residences alone, perhaps a bit jealous, or bitter,
or even mildly vengeful. Warner Brothers thinks it has just what it takes
to give shape to your bad feelings with its new film "Valentine,"
whose advertisements promise a film filled with failed-romance-induced
jealousy and bitterness and vengefulness, and also deadly cutlery.

No doubt there is a market for a well-crafted film which takes the slights
dished out by those who fate made attractive and society made conceited
as its raw material, and mixes them with some grim humor and a weirdly
sympathetic avenging devil to provide a new look at romantic expectations
and realities. "Valentine" is not that film. "Valentine,"
sad to say, is an astonishingly bad film. However depressed you are about
your romantic misfortunes before you enter the film, you will come out
feeling even emptier and lonlier for having wasted eight bucks and two
hours on this tripe. The best we can do in the analysis is to try to avoid
the mistakes of so many stagy, dilatory horror-movie killers, and keep
it brief.

It's been said before, and it should be said again: When making a horror
film, it is important to ensure that there is at least one character whom
the audience does not want to see die. Instead of doing this, "Valentine"
presents us with five of the most vapid heroines ever to jiggle their
way across the silver screen: Paige (Denise Richards), Kate (Marley Shelton),
Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw), Lily (Jessica Cauffiel), and Shelley (Katherine
Heigl).

After the film's opening, which shows a passionate but somewhat misguided
kid at a Valentine's Day dance getting metaphorically shot down and literally
beaten up, we think that perhaps the kid has come back to wreak bloody
death upon these women. In all honesty, this might be a cheering prospect,
as none of these women do anything much during the film to show that they
deserve the gift of life. Instead, they prance around without jobs or
identifiable interests besides themselves, mull over idiot's dilemmas
like whether or not they should tell the police about the homicidal valentines
they receive, and relax in the unearned, unexplained opulence of their
surroundings.

But it soon becomes apparent that the kid is only a suspect, and that
the real killer could be anywhere, like on one of these women's arms.
Is it Boyfriend #1? Boyfriend #2? Who cares? The boyfriends are no better
delineated than their insignificant others, and the film ends up a mere
parade of pretty women and pretty men across pretty, occasionally blood-soaked
scenery.

Yet "Valentine" would just be a bad film if poor characterization
were its only sin. But it doesn't end there. "Valentine"'s four
writers prove the old adage about cooks and broth, stretching this tissue-thin
story out over two unendurable hours. Admittedly, it takes numerous pointless
detours to get there, in the form of cliched subplots and ridiculous T&A
shots (yes, folks, there is a "reason" for Denise Richards'
presence). Even with two hours to work with, though, the writers cannot
be bothered to actually construct the plot, simply letting the scenes
fall where they may. Director Jamie Blanks doesn't help matters with atrocious
pacing and seemingly random camera angles; the setpiece killings inspire
more boredom and impatience than anything else. The visuals are drab,
the music grates, and of course the acting is laughable; it takes a pretty
damn bad cast to make Denise Richards look like a passable thespian, but
that's the cast this film has.

Add in some gratuitous racism (the film's only nonwhite character with
a speaking part is referred to as a "mail-order bride from hell"),
and you've got a film which seems better designed to punish the dateless
than to advance their cause. There's nothing wrong with not having a date
on Valentine's Day, but there is something wrong with you if that circumstance
inspires you to see this film.

If there's something I'm proud of in my reviews, it's that I've always
tried to support my statements about quality with specific references
to things in the film. Even with a film this bad, for example, I took
the time to catalogue its worst horrors and present them in the most objective
language I could muster. Not that that was very objective, but anyone
reading this review knows exactly why this film is bad. So much film criticism
asks you to place your money in the reviewer's ethos's hands, basically,
with bland generalities about quality or lack thereof; I try to show you
what I like and don't like so you could conceivably make your own judgment.
In this case, however, if you think this film does not suck, you are incorrect.